Hydraulic Mills

Hydraulic Mills was a thriving village at the junction of of Ivy Creek and the Rivanna River. In existence from the early 19th century to the mid-twentieth, Hydraulic Mills played an interesting role in local history.

The village of Hydraulic Mills was located in Albemarle County at the juncture of Ivy Creek and the South Fork of the Rivanna just north of River View Farm. The mills there provided lumber for the construction of the University of Virginia and processed local crops of corn and wheat. The village included two grain mills, a sawmill, blacksmith and cooper's shops, a wool carding machine, store houses, dwellings, and the Hydraulic Mills post office.

Contractor John Perry established the mill site in 1818 from which he supplied much of the lumber used to build the University of Virginia. Sold to Nathaniel Burnley in 1829, the mill complex grew to include a grist and merchant mill, a miller’s house, a cooper’s shop, a store house, a blacksmith’s shop, a country store and briefly a silk worm industry. By the mid-nineteenth century Hydraulic had become the head of navigation for the Rivanna River. Farmers from throughout northern and western Albemarle brought wheat and tobacco to be processed and sent down river by batteaux to Richmond and beyond.

After the war, the large estate of Nathaniel Burnley, owner of Hydraulic Mills since 1829, was dispersed. This provided an opportunity for many former slaves, like Hugh Carr, to purchase and cultivate their own farms in the neighborhood. One freedman, Berkeley Bullock, Carr's next-door neighbor had a 75-acre farm with hogs, poultry, bees, and a milk cow, plots of corn and potatoes, an apple and peach orchard, and a vineyard.

By the middle of the 1800's, other commercial developments opened at the mill, including a country store and a post office. Services provided helped support the growing community of Union Ridge.

In September 1870, a devastating flood carried off the lumber and grist mills and all the structures at nearby Rio Mills. While both mills and villages were soon rebuilt, The Great Virginia Flood of 1870 ended river navigation in Albemarle County forever.

The mill was purchased in the 1880's by Rawlings Sammons, an African-American miller. In the 1960's, the remnants of the mill, which included the much of the village, began to slowly disappear under the rising waters of the Rivanna River after the construction of the South Fork Rivanna River Reservoir.

Lincoln Cemetery

The Lincoln Cemetery, a historically African-American cemetery, is located at 2820 Hydraulic Road. The grave of Mary M. Woolfork, who died on August 11, 1883, is the oldest recorded grave at cemetery.